Control of aerial robots is a popular research field as applications with different payloads lead to a variety of flight missions. Quadrotor-type unmanned systems are one such example considered in this paper. The performance in any flight experiment depends strictly on the chosen feedback control scheme, which is the core issue addressed in the paper. A number of approaches have been reported in the literature and this paper presents a survey of these schemes with an in-depth discussion of recent research outcomes. A detailed performance evaluation of the controllers, namely proportional-integral-derivative control, sliding mode control, backstepping control, feedback linearization-based control and fuzzy control schemes, are presented. Due to the popularity of the quadrotor-type aerial vehicles, the contribution of the current work is to provide an in-depth guide to the autopilot designers of quadrotor-type unmanned aerial vehicles.
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